CRAN

CRAN is currently archived by Software Heritage:

• Browse origins

• See coverage

• Loader Source Code

• Loader Developer documentation

• Lister Source Code

• Lister Developer documentation

The Comprehensive R Archive Network is the package management system of the R language.

CRAN does not expose a language-agnostic API with the information we need, so for simplicity/efficiency, Software Heritage’s CRAN lister loads the weekly dump of the CRAN database (in RDS format) and parses it with rpy2 Then for each package, it creates an origin with https://cran.r-project.org/package=package_name as URL.

R packages have intrinsic metadata, mostly the DESCRIPTION file in their root directory, in the deb822 format. Software Heritage’s R loader parses it to extract authorship information, but this file is otherwise not parsed yet.